Vitality, impurity and the war for philosophy's soul

BY ELAINE RAY

Must the discipline of philosophy
remain "pure" in order to survive? No, it doesn't, according to at
least two speakers at a two-day symposium Jan. 29-30 titled
"Philosophy and the Other Humanities." In fact, while Richard
Rorty, professor of comparative literature at Stanford, and Judith
Butler, a professor of rhetoric at the University of
California-Berkeley, acknowledge the value of philosophy as a quest
for objective knowledge, both insist that a more comprehensive view
of the discipline is a good thing.

Rorty and Butler were the first to
take the podium Jan. 29 at the second symposium of a three-part
series called "The Shape of the Humanities," a yearlong examination
sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center. The symposia are
designed to coincide with the yearlong 50th anniversary celebration
of the School of Humanities and Sciences.

Rorty, who assumed a five-year
teaching post last fall, devoted his remarks to the differences
between analytic philosophy and the more humanistic or historical
approach. "The split between analytic and non-analytic philosophy
is tediously familiar to all of us who teach philosophy. But
references to this split often puzzle people in other disciplines,
who have no idea what the fuss is about," said Rorty, describing
analytic philosophy as an attempt to "professionalize the
discipline by making it more scientific."

The schism dates back to the 1940s
and 1950s, when analytic philosophy took over at American
universities, Rorty said. Before then, anglophone philosophy
departments -- those in the United States, Britain and Scandinavia
-- and non-anglophone schools -- in France, Germany, Spain, Italy
and other European countries -- both focused on the study of
philosophy from a historical perspective. "Anybody who taught
philosophy was expected to be able to talk about the relative
merits of Plato and Aristotle, Hobbes and Spinoza, Kant and Hegel,
Nietzsche and Mill," Rorty said, adding that scholars also were
expected to take part in the journal debates of the
times.

During the first half of the century
there was little doubt that philosophy was one of the humanities,
Rorty said. Graduate students "read canonical texts, developed
views about their relative merits and tried to stitch them together
in interesting new patterns. Up through the forties, university
teachers of literature and history usually had some idea of the
interests and views of their colleagues in the philosophy
department, and conversely. This had ceased to be the case by
1965," he said.

As a graduate student in the early
1950s, Rorty recalled that some of his professors expected him to
examine the contributions of the great philosophers, while others
insisted that he familiarize himself with journal articles, many of
which tested scientific theories. By the time he earned his degree
and completed his military service in 1958, it was clear that in
order to be an attractive candidate on the job market, one needed a
firm grounding in the more scientific approach.

"Looking like a promising young
philosopher at Princeton, where I got a job in 1961, was almost
exclusively a matter of talking the new talk -- of keeping up with
the current journals and getting on the right preprint circuits.
For we who were bucking for tenure, there was little percentage in
being historically minded," he said.

By 1980 the gap between anglophone
departments like those at Harvard and Princeton and the
non-anglophone departments had grown wide. Princeton even abolished
its foreign language requirement for graduate students in
philosophy. Although he has not taught in a philosophy department
since 1982, Rorty said he suspects that the focus on the scientific
approach persists. In analytic philosophy departments, historical
studies are considered marginal and "wimpy" -- not part of the
"hard core" of the discipline -- he said. These departments place
more value on work that offers hope of "achieving definitive,
quasi-scientific results -- of knowledge as opposed to mere
opinion," he said. "You will get more points in my profession for
having a novel argument relevant to these topics than, for example,
you would get from publishing a comprehensive history of moral
philosophy in Europe from Montaigne to Kant."

Rorty said that because he tends to
dissolve philosophical puzzles rather than solve them he is often
described as an "end-of-philosophy philosopher," a characterization
he disputes. "Philosophy cannot possibly end unless cultural change
ends, and, like everyone else, I hope that such change will
continue. There will always be people trying to put the old and the
new together."

What Rorty would like to see is an
end to the effort to confine philosophy to a scientific definition.
Analytic philosophy departments do not provide graduate students
with a set of methods or tools, he said; instead, they familiarize
students with the various "language-games" played by the faculty of
that department. He characterized the contention by analytic
philosophers that their greater professionalism has helped them
achieve greater clarity and rigor than their predecessors as
"pathetic," adding that "when a discipline is driven to defend
itself by appeal to form rather than content, one may begin to
wonder whether it has the self-confidence it claims to
have."

Rorty concluded his remarks,
however, by acknowledging the value of analytic philosophy. "For
all its pseudo-scientistic pretensions, and despite the countless
dead ends it has backed itself into, twentieth-century analytic
philosophy will also have transformative effects, and so will put
our descendants in its debt. It may not have solved any interesting
puzzles, but it will have earned itself an important place in the
history of ideas. That is more than many past philosophical
movements have managed to do," he said.

In her presentation, Butler also
lamented the tendency for philosophy departments to isolate
themselves from other disciplines in the humanities. The result is
that philosophy has "doubled itself," she said. "When standards of
clarity become part of a hermetic discipline, they no longer become
communicable, and what one gets as a result is, paradoxically, a
non-communicable clarity."

She talked about her own experiences
teaching feminist philosophy at Yale, much to the consternation of
the purists. "It was not a question of whether I was teaching bad
philosophy or was not teaching philosophy well, but whether my
classes were philosophy at all," Butler said.

She cited as another example
Harvard's Cornel West, a philosopher by training, who teaches in
the divinity school and in Afro-American studies. She said he uses
utopian pragmatism to address race issues. "Does it say something
about the limitations of institutional philosophy that he finds no
home there?" she asked. "In some ways, his work shows the
continuing relevance of the tradition of American pragmatism for
contemporary struggles for racial equality and dignity. Is it the
transposition of that tradition onto the context of race relations
that renders the philosophical dimension of that work
impure?"

Butler added that almost every
feminist philosopher she knows is no longer working in a philosophy
department, but in other areas such as law, political science,
education, comparative literature and English. Although
philosophical purists may view this as "scandalous," Butler sees it
as a hopeful development. "Indeed, I would suggest that as
philosophy has lost its purity, it has accordingly gained its
vitality throughout the humanities," she said.

Other symposium speakers included
Stanford philosophy Professors John Perry, Lanier Anderson and
Kenneth Taylor; French and Italian Professors Robert Harrison and
Hans Gumbrecht, who also teaches comparative literature; and law
Professor Thomas Grey. Speakers from other institutions included
Laurence Dickey, a professor of history from the University of
Wisconsin; Allen Wood, a Yale philosophy professor; and Princeton
professors John Cooper, philosophy, and Josiah Ober, classics. The
next symposium, titled "Have the Humanistic Disciplines Collapsed?"
is scheduled for April 23-24. SR